The Magician in the Museum
by awertvegtr
Summary: Doorsteps are very dangerous places to leave orphaned babies... Anyone might pick them up. In this case, a world-reknown forensic anthropologist with a soft heart and a hard head. No pairings yet.
1. The Baby in Britain

It was _freezing._ Dr. Temperance Brennan pulled her overcoat tighter around herself.

She was on a holiday. Only because Angela _and_ Booth – not to mention Sweets – had pushed her into it. They'd said that recently she'd been working _far_ too hard, and as a young woman in her late twenties she should go somewhere fun and have, well, fun.

So she'd taken a month's sabbatical, and she'd decided to go to England.

There had been an archaeological five-day conference going on in Dublin, and Temperance – or Bones, and she was better-known among her friends – had already been. Then, at Angela's insistence over the phone – who, by the way, didn't know she was actually in an archaeological conference in the first place – she'd decided to visit London.

So far, she'd been in London a week; and, to Angela's phone-expressed delight, she had booked a flight to see Paris for four days – Angela didn't know that between going to the Louvre and perhaps touring the city, Bones had found _another_ conference, this one on kinesiology – before going back to DC. Her plane to Paris left in two days.

Tonight, she'd foolishly had the idea to use the famed London Underground. She'd reached the end of the line, gotten off, and had a coffee. And when she'd looked at the Underground timetable, she'd been rather annoyed at the fact that the last train heading toward London had just left.

It was eleven at night, Halloween, and Temperance was annoyed.

So she'd left the station with the vague idea to find a hotel and waiting until morning, which was when the next train left.

Unfortunately, the outskirts of London were suburban, primarily inhabited by urban neighbourhoods. This meant that there wasn't a hotel in sight. She couldn't call for a cab, seeing as she didn't have the number, and her phone battery had just died on her as she stared at the phone contemplatively.

This was how Dr Temperance Brennan, famous forensic anthropologist and author, found herself wandering the streets of Little Whinging, London, at eleven thirty on Halloween evening.

Bones scowled. What was she supposed to do now? Wandering up to somebody's house and politely asking if they could call a taxi for her wasn't an option – she'd already tried, and the woman who'd answered the door had told her to get lost and stop bothering the neighbours, it was midnight on a frickin' weekday, couldn't she leave them alone? She'd already looked all over the neighbourhood for a police station and hadn't found one. There wasn't a pedestrian in sight.

Bones shivered and buried her hands deeper into her pockets, bowing her head down. Great. Now it was starting to rain, too!

She turned Acorn Street. There was a park at the end, and Bones sighed. It looked like she'd have to spend the night on a bench, or up a tree. She crossed the road and reached for the park gates, only to hiss in dismay. They were padlocked shut.

Well, then. Bones sighed again, and turned on her heel. She'd just have to wander the streets until eight seventeen, which was when the next train left.

Twenty minutes later, she found her eyelids drooping as she walked into Privet Drive. She stopped outside Number Five, and went into the garden. There was a tall beech tree – perhaps not the best tree for climbing into, but certainly the only one in sight – that she scaled in moments. She found a wide branch to rest on and leaned against the trunk, settling down comfortably. One thing she was thankful for was that she didn't wasn't a restless sleeper.

Her eyes began to drift shut, and she would have dozed off; only moments later, her eyes snapped open.

There was a _cat_ sitting on the wall of Number Four.

This was, perhaps, unusual; but Bones had once owned a cat – before it was run over – and she knew cat habits. Cats might sit still. But not as still or as stiffly as this cat was. Cats might have markings. But not markings as perfectly symmetrical as this.

Her anthropologist's mind noted that this cat's bone structure was vaguely...humanoid. For example –

Bones blinked, and rubbed her eyes. Then she grasped an overhead branch and, as silently as she could, swung from the tree, landing in a crouch.

Cats did _not_ pinch the bridges of their nose with their claws!

Bones was now suspicious. Still in a crouch, she moved forwards, right up to the hedge of Number Five's. Which, by the way, was dying out. It was very thin; Bones looked through.

The cat _sighed._

_Well,_ Bones thought to herself. _What was _in_ that coffee?_ Her second thought was: _Booth would be jumping up and down in glee. Temperance Brennan, doing something exciting that doesn't involve murders and bones._

She was distracted from the cat when she heard a set of shoes walking down the road. _Finally! _She crowed internally. _A pedestrian! Someone with a cell phone! _She prepared to straighten up, to ask the person walking by if she could use a cell phone.

She froze when she heard a series of clicks coming from across the road, not unlike those a cigarette lighter, and all the lights in neighbourhood went out.

She frowned. Well, at least the passerby wouldn't have left. She stopped in her tracks when, of all things, she heard the passerby _greet_ the cat.

"Fancy seeing you here, Professor McGonagall."

Bones blinked. _Professor McGonagall? What?_ Maybe the cat was the passerby's. And he'd named it Professor McGonagall. Well, not unreasonable. She'd named her own cat Copernicus. The man could perfectly well name his cat Professor McGonagall, even though she couldn't remember any poet, writer, scientist, philosopher, lawyer or doctor, off the top of her head, who had had that name. She peeked through the gap in the hedge.

The man on the other side of the road was...well, he looked strange, completely incongruous among the neat, ordinary suburb of Privet Drive. In fact, she doubted if anything _like_ this man had ever been seen in Privet Drive.

He was tall. Not as tall as Booth, maybe, but certainly taller than her. He was also thin, and very old, judging by the amazing shade of silver in his hair and beard...which was _long,_ and remarkably well-kept. It was also long enough to tuck into his belt.

Bones blinked. He was wearing what looked like sixteenth-century garments. To her trained eye, they looked quite authentic, and expensive. The long robes – close to a dress, _certainly_ what sixteenth century monks would have worn, except perhaps without what looked like an expensive leather belt with a bright golden buckle. Except perhaps not in such a bright shade of red, and probably not patterned with yellow figures – he wore under a purple cloak, which swept the ground. He also wore high-heeled, silver-buckled boots.

His eyes were a bright, electric blue, light and sparkling behind half-moon spectacles and his nose was very long and crooked. Bones's sharp eyes caught that the nose had been broken three times; one, nearest to the tip, probably sustained in childhood, and the other two breaks, closer to the bridge, were probably sustained both at the same time, in early adulthood. Without closer inspection, she wouldn't be able to tell, though.

Well, judging by the fact that this man had named the cat Professor McGonagall, and that his body structure suggested he was at least in his nineties – although, Bones remarked, he was remarkably spry for his age – then perhaps he was senile.

His odd taste in clothing certainly seemed to support that theory.

Bones looked back at the cat. And bit back a yelp.

Where a vaguely humanoid tabby cat had sat all too stiffly before, now stood a woman. She wore identical garments as the man, but in darker, more sedate colours.

A corner of her mind was telling her that, simply, this _could not be true._ The woman had to have been there before, and maybe Bones had simply not seen her.

However, the larger part of her brain was telling her that, logically, the woman-cat was exactly that: a cat that turned into a woman. Or perhaps a woman that turned into a cat. Whatever the case, it was a logical explanation: fantastic, perhaps, but certainly logical.

She shifted nervously as she listened to their conversation.

As she listened to their words, her brow began to furrow. As she watched, silent, awed, a man – a giant – came on a _flying motorbike,_ of all things. He handed the man – Dumbledore – a bundle of deep blue blankets. She listened, in growing horror, as Dumbledore proclaimed this _baby_ the saviour of the world.

The she watched, in fascination and disquiet, as Dumbledore, the woman, and the giant-man called Hagrid, left the baby on the doorstep of Number Four, Privet Drive.

Then the Hagrid left, the woman-cat turned back into a cat and slunk away, and Dumbledore stared at the sleeping child on the doorstep. Then, he murmured something quietly to the child, who cooed in its sleep, and left, walking down the street. Once he turned the corner into Daisy Drive, all the lights in the street flared back to life.

Brennan got to her feet. Before she fully understood what she was doing, she was stumbling forward, across the street and to the sleeping child.

It was only a _child;_ a _baby,_ and yet these people had left it here, with only a letter written in green ink and a blanket. Brennan sat on the steps next to the child, biting her lip. She made a decision.

She'd take the baby, and leave him at the nearest police station, when she found one. She carefully scooped him up in her arms, reassured when the baby didn't even move in its sleep. Which, she reminded herself as she began to walk down the street, baby in arms, she needed to find somewhere to sleep.

Thirty minutes later, she checked into a small hotel she found in Acorn Avenue. The clerk at the desk said that the nearest police station was an hour's walk away, and opened in the morning. Bones, hurrying up the stairs to her room and tucking the envelope in her pocket, took a lot of care not to wake the baby up – statistically, babies that slept more where more aware during the day and developed better sleeping patterns when they were older.

In her room, she frowned. The baby was wet, and she didn't know what she could use as a makeshift diaper. She cast her eyes around her small room, and her eyes fell upon the sheets and on the scissors in the desk. Well, the baby needed a diaper. Booth would probably have frowned and told her at least a dozen why not to ...

Setting the baby in the bed, she unwrapped it carefully from the tangle of blue blankets, and bit back a scowl. It was only dressed in a diaper! And a soaked wet thin flannel one, at that. _Poor baby!_ She thought to herself. The child would catch a cold, which, not given the proper care, could rapidly evolve into pneumonia. And given the child's age – she guessed it was perhaps a little younger than a year and a half, at a guess and looking at its development – its immune system would not be able to fight off infection unless it had been given medication. And _good_ medication, at that.

Bones efficiently stripped the sheets from the bed, leaving the baby lying, fast asleep, in its wet diaper, on the desk. She carefully cut out a section of sheet, and put the baby on the bed. Half an hour later, the child had finally opened its eyes; Bones had discovered that 'it' was actually a 'he'; and that changing babies with a makeshift diaper made of hotel sheets was _hard._

The baby was awake, and he was cooing quietly at her. Bones picked him up, rocking him in her arms; he shivered, and began to wail. "Oh no. No, no, no." Bones bit her lip and gently jogged the baby up and down. Logically, she knew that she was supposed to try to calm the infant down, which should be simple and easy and a relatively stress-free task – so why was she feeling a strange, small knot inside her chest? "Don't cry, little baby boy. Don't cry."

The baby shivered, but he was quiet. Bones had an idea and promptly rolled her proverbial mental eyes at herself for not think of it before; _perhaps he's cold,_ she thought to herself. She carefully wrapped him in the blue blanket he'd been wrapped in. He cooed a little more before falling asleep, head resting against her chest.

Bones looked down at him, and gasped. He had a long, jagged cut all down the left side of his forehead; it was bleeding profusely, even though Brennan knew it should have clotted by now; he had not cut himself while she was holding him, and the unstable people who'd left him at Privet Drive hadn't hurt him, as far as she could see, which put injury time at least two hours ago. She tore out another section of sheet, and wiped down the cut. Then she set the baby down on the bed.

She sat down next to him, blinking in surprise when something crinkled in her pocket. Of course, she thought, fishing the envelope out of her pocket. The letter left with the boy.

It was made of a thick paper. _Parchment_, her brain supplied. By the feel of it, it was apparently made of calf's skin. Bones frowned: the letter inside felt quite thick – at least three calves had to have been killed for the envelope alone, not to mention the letter inside. That was illegal nowadays; why couldn't the sender of the letter have used paper?

She slid a finger under the flap, opening it easily. The letter, a double-sided page made of _more_ killed calves' skin. She lifted to paper to her nose and sniffed. _Authentic,_ her brain reaffirmed. Her lips pursed as she read the letter.

The letter was written in emerald green ink, in thin, slanted handwriting, and in perfect lines even though the parchment had no pre-printed lines. Brennan read the letter once. And then twice. She blinked, and, just to make sure, read it three times.

"Well," she addressed the sleeping baby on the bed, even though he couldn't hear her. "It appears as though aside from those people at Number Four, you're all alone in the world." She paused. "Harry Potter." She frowned, and stood up, heading for the bathroom.

"Personally, I've never been fond of pet names. Harry. Too childish for my taste, don't you think? Harold? No, I don't find it a nice name, either." She cocked her head to a side, coming back out of the bathroom. By now, the baby was awake. "Harlan?" she suggested. The baby's face scrunched up. "I don't like it either," she told him. She sat down on the bed next to him.

"Harper?" The baby whined. "It sounds too much like Parker. Booth's son," she added. "Harvey? No, sounds like a university. Or perhaps a type of beer," she mused.

"Harrison?" The baby made a funny, warbling, almost mocking sort of sound. "No? It's a nice name, no need to make fun of it. How about... Hadriel? Hadriel, maybe?" The baby made a soft cooing noise, sounding almost pleased. "Do you like that name? Hadriel?" The baby blinked up at her, a little grin playing around his lips. "Hadriel? Alright, then Hadriel it is." The newly-named Hadriel cooed again.

Bones sighed again, set Hadriel on the desk chair: it was padded, and warm. She didn't want to him to sleep in the same bed; just in case she moved during the night – although she rarely did, it was a precaution – and hurt him. She redressed the bed, pointedly ignoring the large diaper-shaped hole she'd snipped into the sheets. With that, she closed her eyes and slept.

* * *

As much as it pains me to say this, updates are becoming quite rare... however, to reward you for your patience, once I do update it'll probably be a super-extra-specially-long chapter, just for YOU :).

_Roses are red  
Violets are blue  
You review mine  
I'll review you  
(And even reply and everyfink)_


	2. The Warning to the Readers

Hey everyone –

Due to some recent trouble, I've had to abandon this account. _Magician in the Museum_ will be passed over to my secondary account.

It will still be under the same title and summary; the link for the author's profile is here:

w w w . f a n f i c t i o n . n e t / u / 2 7 8 9 0 5 6 /

To everyone (yes that means you!): I'm extremely sorry that _MitM_ took so long to update – it was only ever intended to be a one-shot, you see. However, I've been convinced by several very nice, lovely people to turn it into a multi-chaptered story – but don't be alarmed if I don't update for a while! I tend to forget about writing sometimes ;)

Go over and check it out – Chapter two is up!


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